In general, a fluid sample analysis has been widely applied not only in the fields of chemistry and biotechnology but also the field of diagnosis using blood or body fluids collected from patients.
Recently, various small-sized analysis and diagnosis equipments and technologies thereof have been developed to more conveniently and efficiently conduct the fluid sample analysis.
One of important factors of the fluid sample analysis is preprocessing of a fluid sample.
Here, the processing of the fluid sample means, before the fluid sample analysis, extracting a desired amount of a sample, and then precisely processing the extracted sample, for example, in a dilution buffer at an appropriate rate or separating and refining the extracted sample by mixing the extracted sample with a reaction reagent that is in a solid or liquid state, filling the extracted sample with the reaction reagent, or using a support.
In general, to this end, the fluid sample is preprocessed using a pipette or a fountain pen filter. However, an amount of a sample to be preprocessed is very small and the sample should be very precisely preprocessed when a sample analysis is performed in a unit of a lab-on-a-chip or a lab-on-a-tip. Thus, it is not easy to precisely preprocess the very small amount of the sample using the pipette or the fountain pen filter.
Furthermore, in the case of a field inspection technique, a collected sample is preprocessed and injected again into a measurement device. However, an error occurs in the amount of the sample injected again.
Thus, there is a growing need to develop a sampler that is capable of minimizing errors in processing a tiny amount of blood or other samples and that is easy to manipulate so that even persons who are not specially educated or trained can handle it after listening to a brief explanation thereof.